Here and Now

...heh.... I got to "Guest Post" on my friend Aaron's blog  here... He's having guest posts every Monday this year. What a great idea...something maybe I should do....hmmm.... I like stealing great ideas :) Look for Guest Posts on here someday :)

Click to Read it :)

I was sitting in a waiting room, and I saw on on the magazine rack this: Now, I had no idea that Newsweek was going out of print. It's all going that way, I suppose. "Print is dead," (Dr. Egon Spengler was RIGHT)*.  Well, maybe not dead...but on life support... So, okay. Here's an article about Newsweek: Linky So Newsweek is going all digital and they're kinda sorta sad about it...but wait! We're TRENDSETTERS, so we're actually forging a NEW path... Um, no. You're cutting costs and going the path of least resistance, highest profitability... but at the cost of a calculated percentage of your readership. Let's face it, some are not ready to make the digital jump (hard to pass those around in the waiting rooms, you know what I mean?) and many people simply LIKE a physical something  to hold in their hands. And that's okay. They'll go to Time or something else... Until it goes all digital, too. The day of consumable media...

We are celebrating Communion this week. More importantly, we are taking the time to talk about Communion this week. If you search in the little box in the upper left corner, you'll see that I've written more than a few times on Communion over the past seven years of this blog's existence. And I THINK only once have I done a repost before this ( Bono on Grace - way back when I did the Grace series...) and that was simply because something I had written before linked in nicely with a series I was writing at the time... But I thought this was worth reposting.  If you're in worship this week you might hear this, or something very like it.  I don't often think I've written something worth repeating... Held Too Lightly "The Body of Christ broken for you on the cross..." The words rest in my ears, familiar yet powerful. The bread rests on my palm. It weighs nothing. I close my eyes and I can't tell it's there. I have to press down on it with my...

I was going to put this song on my YouTube channel, but I see somebody already did a couple years ago. This is my favorite Scott Phillips song, it's called "Just Because" Scott is from around here, and his parents go to our church. He's doing a band thing lately called  Good Little Giants . They're doing cool stuff in the area, you should check them out if you get the chance. But this isn't about Scott, or his band. The song... "I want a love, that looks past positions A love just because not a love with conditions I can search the whole world and find all kinds of love But love that is real is love just because..." It's a fan favorite, too. I think he often closes shows with it. The words resonate deeply with me. The idea, the truth of the song resonates deeply with me. It hasn't always - I used to think I knew more about love than I did. Most of our lives, we deal with transactional relationships. You give me what I w...

Click it to read it

...updated the sermon site with last week's message: End of the World As We Know It...And I Feel Fine I've been doing all kind of writing (obviously elsewhere)... sermons, Bible study, I've been outlining a couple ideas for books (and working on writing, too heh) - so, just "official" writing totals almost 15,000 words for the past month - personal writing has been maybe double that for the past month. If you're wondering where I've been :)

Oh, you need a map? 

For the New Year...

I may have scheduled this already but...oh well :)

Obviously not mine :) We went to see The Hobbit  last night.  We caught it in 3D - 48 fps, for those who care about such things. It was stunning - I never care about 3D, but I highly recommend seeing it in this format. It was only $6.25 each for the matinee, no upcharge for 3D (Tinseltown in Erie) so we were pretty satisfied with that - same price as seeing it in 2D...  And, yeah, everything is super clear and bright and...well, don't you want that in a film? I know it doesn't LOOK like other movies.  Who cares? It's not other movies. It's something new. New technology. And it really works.* But that's not the point, here. I went in kind of skeptical not of the technology (which, obviously, I'm ready to embrace) but of the story. How do you take a 300ish page children's book and make it THREE movies? Really? But...well, Jackson did a great job. First of all, young Bilbo is Watson from BBC's Sherlock  - which I didn't pay attention to going ...

I don't care who really said this, this is true. And since it's not JUST a picture...it's worth some extra words... :)

Merry Christmas! Let Linus tell you what today is really all about:

Just found this and couldn't resist :)

From Morguefile So... this is what the future of publishing looks like. Well, one of many futures...: To Be or Not To Be A guy posts a kickstarter to try to raise $20k to publish his book on Hamlet* and raises (with 3 days to go) nearly $400k!  Are you kidding me? Really? That's awesome on so many levels. Oh, he has to deliver now. And the stretch goals are pretty cool, too (they better be, when you top your goal by- what is that - 1000% or something...). But there are a thousand other books sitting on kickstarter that won't get funded. Why this one? Who knows. In some ways, kickstarter can democratize the publishing business. Backers can decide AHEAD of publishing whether or not something will be, as this, a "bestseller" or a no go. And no warehouses full of books that didn't sell**. Authors and publishers and distributors know from the getgo how many, how much, and where to - well, with the initial run. I guess there could be subsequent printings. And ...

Nothing to see here at the moment, but yesterday's message is posted at  Let God Speak...Here And Now...

...yesterday :) I posted the weekend's sermon yesterday. I created the site a week or two ago, but got the first message posted yesterday. I cleaned it up in a more or less "as preached" version - with a couple links (video clip and scripture passages). Not sure what else I'll do with links - depends on how much (if any) time I have to devote to upkeep. Anyway, the link is on the side: Let God Speak...Here And Now (pretty original, huh?) Also, link  Here  it's just beattysermons.blogspot.com Should be easy enough for even me to remember... :) And, the audio for sermons at Otterbein church is located  Here Newest content is at the bottom of the page (not sure how to do that otherwise, I don't update the page). She's usually a couple days into the week before she gets the newest message audio on the page, please be patient.